Keszthely, Balaton Region, Hungary
Today was very cool and windy, quite a change from the mid 90s on Sunday! There are two venues here, the Fonix venue and the Ady venue. The Ady venue is bigger, with six courts outdoors plus two (not very good) practice courts and a bubble over two courts. From the patio overlooking the courts one can see the big church in the distance. As you can see the courts are in a long line and on a windy day such as today, there’s not much wind protection.
I played Sylvia Singer from Austria. She speaks several languages, German, English, Italian and seems to understand Spanish pretty well too. The other interesting thing about Sylvia is that she’s a diabetic and has a port in her arm for insulin and she tests herself pretty often to see if she needs to eat or needs insulin. She’s pretty high energy too. I won 60 61…the one game I lost Sylvia was convinced I’d won when it was deuce, but I wouldn’t win a game that way…and she ended up winning the game with a nice smash and was so happy. I play Maria Faria tomorrow in singles and in mixed.
Sylvia is the tall woman in purple; Eva, my opponent from yesterday is bottom right; and Maria, my opponent tomorrow is top left with Eva.
I watched a couple of matches today; there were two American guys playing, both lost, Janos lost in 3 sets to the 5th seed and had 2 match points (the Hungarian guy was a very good counterpuncher, who footfaulted 90% of the time at least); Aussie Alan Walsh beat Hans Webber who played a good match; Alan was simply too good.
Warming up this morning there were more Aussies on the court next to us than Americans in the entire tournament…four. And none were under 75.